Kinda. The thing is that the reliable programmers who specialize in this kind of thing work for companies like Disqus, whose jobs revolve 100% around this. However, random PHB at ${dying newspaper} has never heard of Disqus, but has heard of Facebook, which similarly to the newspaper employs many programmers, few of whom consider it the primary job of their organization to help, and not f--- up, third party websites.
If Disqus (or Livewyre or whatever) ever made this kind of screw up, they'd seriously destroy their credibility, but unfortunately....
Fox is part of a class of media outlets that tells its audience what it believes it wants to hear. That's it. It's not about fact checking or anything like that, it's about knowing that its audience would actually stop watching it if it changed direction and concentrated more on telling them what Fox believes is true, rather than what the audience thinks is true.
On that note, someone is bound to mention MSNBC, but MSNBC isn't really watched by anyone. MSNBC's mistake, FWIW, is that it's trying to do the same thing as Fox but for a different audience, but doesn't realize that liberals, by and large, don't "want to hear" things they "agree with" if they can't be backed up with facts (plus I don't believe NBC actually has any idea what a diverse bunch liberals actually are in practice.)
I'm embarassed to say that I've worked for at least one media outlet (not going to say which, thankfully most Slashdotters have probably never heard of it) that tries to do the same thing though publishing a variety of different magazines. The "liberal" products did badly, the "tea party" products did well. I leave it to the reader to determine why.
It's personal, and it meets all of the definitions of computer.
...yeah, but we're talking PCs, not computers. You know, I could have understood you making this argument if the parent had spelt out PC as "Personal Computer", because then you could have said "Oh, I missed the "personal" bit" or made a confused argument that would have ignored the fact "PC" has a specific meaning, "Personal Computer" has a specific meaning, and that neither mean quite the same thing as "any computer with any personal aspect to it."
As far as TFA goes, Slashdot is trolling us once again. Yay.
1. Excede is hardly typical. And, as you point out, they do provide an unmetered period.
2. I'm not sure if you mean PTP WiMax ISPs by Wireless ISPs (in which case if they don't fix their caps they're going to lose customers fast) or mobile phone ISPs, in which case you're unlikely to be hooking a games console up to it or using it as your primary home ISP, but either way, it's not an issue.
In the real world, a typical cap is something in the order of magnitude of Comcast's 250GB limit.
Finally, there's a difference between an optical disc based console game in terms of how it's provided and a game designed to be delivered to someone's harddrive over the Internet. 30GB is not typical of the latter, as users of Steam can testify. When was the last time you downloaded a game from Steam that wasn't a few gigabytes in size at most?
Why? Because with no local storage and limited memory, console games generally need access to uncompressed textures already processed to fit the resolution they're going to be displayed at.
I suspect the OP's comment is a combination of wishful thinking combined with misreading headlines. What is true is that:
1. The ChromeBook is doing well on Amazon. The fact it's topping the list of laptops shouldn't be seen as meaning that ChromeBooks in general are doing better than Windows 8 laptops because there are many, many, of the latter, and very few of the former.
2. Acer is saying that their ChromeBook is selling better than their Windows 8 machines. Again, that has to be balanced by context, Acer is one manufacturer, there are many more manufacturers of Windows laptops than ChromeBook laptops (and as such sales of ChromeBooks are split across fewer manufacturers)
There's no doubt the ChromeBook is doing extraodinarily well for a device that nobody has ever heard of. Actually, it'd be doing well even if it was well heard of. It's clearly a major threat to Microsoft and Apple right now. It may well be out-performing Apple's laptop sales already. But it's certainly not the top selling platform, even if some individual devices are top selling laptops.
Against that you kind of have to assume that at the very least this'll result in lower prices for new games, which by itself isn't a bad thing. Publishers will have to charge less to attract people who bought second hand games because they couldn't afford full price, as well as people like you who bought a $60 game seeing it as a $30 game with a $30 deposit.
I'm not that upset about this proposal, not so much because I see it as something that the market will correct, or because I don't have an X-Box, but because ultimately I've been a Steam user for a while now and have the same limitations on reselling bought content. But within a few months, pretty much every Steam game ends up in the $10-20 range, which is considerably lower than what either a new or used console game, in my experience (I do have a Wii), costs a few months after release.
Sure, eventually a Wii game will end up going down to the $10-20, but it usually takes a couple of years, not a few months.
And that's despite the fact it's Steam, which for all of its faults, has huge advantages over physical media that add value in areas where being unable to resell content takes away. I have two PCs, I install the same games on both of them, it syncs the games (usually) across both platforms, it handles updates, and best of all I don't have to drive seven miles to the nearest Gamestop or Best Buy just to find out that the game I want isn't even in stock.
The question I have for Microsoft is why are you even doing this? Why not get rid of the optical drive altogether and adopt the Steam model wholesale? If you're going to insist that users are connected to the Internet all of the time, then why not take advantage of that Internet connection, slap a huge hard drive in the box to replace the obligatory optical drive and flash card, and let people buy their games online?
Interestingly Gamestop's share price dropped yesterday, something that was seen by most of the financial press as being related to this unsubstantiated rumor.
I don't see Microsoft as suddenly seeing it in its best interests to take on all the risk associated with every Windows release simply because Apple has a profitable niche market.
Everything about Surface screams "Look guys, this is our vision for how tablets should work. Now go away and make your own". It's sufficiently different from generic Android tablets to be obviously an attempt to introduce something new, while sufficiently niche - priced high, sold without encroaching on competitors - to obviously not be a sign Microsoft intends to take over hardware sales.
Moreover, it's necessary for Microsoft to do this. Google tried to do something similar when Honeycomb was released, but didn't go the whole distance, instead leaving it to third parties to produce the tablets according to a restricted specification that was compromized by having to be something every manufacturer could support. It was a disaster. The common platform appeared, but with minimal innovation (the Transformer was pretty much the only tablet that showed signs of the latter) and Honeycomb tablets sold poorly. It took Amazon, who basically told Google to go take a running jump from a short pier, to produce an Android device that actually had mass appeal.
Before this, Microsoft has only once been able to persuade a third party to do the hardware innovation necessary to create a first class platform for the software they want to sell, and in that case Microsoft was increadibly lucky, with the dominos set up right for them. That was in 1981. And IBM did the heavy lifting. There is no IBM in 2013. If Microsoft wants to popularize a new computing platform, it has to do it itself. It can, eventually, sit back and let third parties produce future Windows tablets, but right now it has to present to the world the full package, so people know what kind of tablet a Windows tablet is. And if third parties also want to produce Windows tablets, that's great and Microsoft will be happy to support them, even if it results in poor Surface sales.
Blade Runner is the one with Harrison Ford, I think they use a blimp at one point for advertising living on other planets but beyond that the blimps aren't really a fixture. As blimps are, today (and before the movie came out), used for advertising, that's not really a prediction of the future.
Corbin Dallas orders his meal from a blimp in The Fifth Element. While again blimps don't make other appearances (from memory) in that movie, the unusual (by 21st century standards) nature of the interaction, apparently considered usual in the Fifth Element universe, means that it's more likely to be what you're talking about.
This has been Morning for Pedants. Coming up next: the hilarious new game show "Your using the wrong word!"
If they were using hydrogen, which they're not, the giant ball of gas that's caught fire isn't going to "fall" on anything, until it turns into water - and I don't mean steam either, I mean liquid, heavier than air, water.
Conan O'Brien just called me to say the governor of some State south of New York would pitch in too, but as I've heard the same f---ing joke now, from Conan, about a gagillion times now I slammed the phone down.
Generally the economics are, indeed, linked to the abundance (and availability) of something.
That said, I'd like to see them use hydrogen anyway, like the AC. It's cheap, it's not nearly as dangerous as its reputation, and doing something about the image of hydrogen as a very dangerous thing to put in balloons or other lighter than air craft would help spur development of the latter.
There's never been some golden age where everything on TV was awesome. And there are some superb shows on TV right now, from Breaking Bad to Person of Interest. In fact, I'd say some of the best television ever made has been produced in the last decade or so in the US.
Impressed by the idiot moderation and the even more idiot arguments.
Is this like Napster, or more like Winamp, both of which arguably existed to help those in the pirated music subculture, but with the former designed to facilitate the infringement, while the latter kinda was neutral but in an environment in which most users would, nonetheless, be copyright infringers?
I can't tell, because of the idiots who think that Napster and Google do the same thing, and have made this argument impossible to follow as a result.
You don't need to jailbreak an Android phone. Unless the carrier has deliberately locked it down (very, very, rare - AT&T did this with some Motorola phones) the phone will allow you to install software of your choice.
You may be confusing Jailbreaking with rooting. Rooting simply means getting access to certain kernel features that aren't normally available for security (your security) reasons. In general, Google's done a decent job keeping up with legitimate uses of root and providing APIs and subsystems to non-root users to implement things that once required root, such as tethering. I rooted my old Android 2.1-2.3 devices, I haven't needed to use root since ICS (4.0) however.
As far as CyanogenMod, do you even know what that is? It's a custom ROM. It has nothing to do with jailbreaking or security or any other crap. It's a custom version of Android modified to include features not normally included with Android, such as replacements for the shell (the Launcher in Android speak), better audio controls, etc.
You don't need it, but it's a bonus that CyanogenMod is available. Something like that is impossible in the iOS world - because iOS is a locked down system. CyanogenMod is only available because Android is open. So people can want an Android phone because they want an environment in which custom ROMs are possible.
I appreciate the concept of an open phone with an open operating system is hard to understand to many iPhone users, but that's what you get with Android. An arbitrary Android device will run arbitrary Android apps. You can develop them yourself, download them from the Internet, buy and install them using the Amazon app store - which you download from the Internet and install yourself, or use Google Play to buy and install them. You don't need the rotting corpse of Steve Jobs to give you permission. You get to enjoy your phone, the way you want.
Not only is that evidently not true, but I've seen plenty of criticism of Obama that seems likely to only exist because of the race angle. Do you think Bush would have had his country of birth questioned?
If you want a proper trial, simply present yourself at the nearest major international airport and I'm sure the US government will be happy to bring you home for one.
No they wouldn't, they'd put you in a certain prison camp in Cuba.
...because the ZX80 (and ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum, which used more advanced versions of the same BASIC) had a visual editor with keywords auto-completed and dynamic syntax checking back in 1980. ZX BASIC was even windowed (on a 32x24 character screen!) with the upper window being for program I/O and/or viewing the program code, the lower for entering commands, seeing status information, and editing lines.
The thing about an IDE is that it's an obvious concept and pretty much anyone who's tried to make programming more user friendly has implemented such a thing. True, NetBeans looks nothing like the ZX80 or EMACS, but then Java in 2013 looks nothing like ZX BASIC either - as languages have evolved and projects have become more complex, the tools to manage them have needed to become more complex and manage more concepts.
What's funny is that we bothered giving the concept a name at an arbitrary cut-off point in the development of development environments.
It takes about 6 months for a dedicated SCRUM team to knock a version of Android out that meets a major US carrier's requirements after Google releases their code to the community. I know because I've done it. Verizon has about 6000 requirements for their devices, Sprint and AT&T are not far behind. On top of the carrier requirements, which could be anything from implementing a custom address book sync adapter, to ensuring AGPS works accurately, you need to meet US Government requirements.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying that, for example, most users of the GSM Galaxy Nexus in the US are doing so illegally?
We, after all, get our updates before Google releases the code to the community, not six months afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda. The thing is that the reliable programmers who specialize in this kind of thing work for companies like Disqus, whose jobs revolve 100% around this. However, random PHB at ${dying newspaper} has never heard of Disqus, but has heard of Facebook, which similarly to the newspaper employs many programmers, few of whom consider it the primary job of their organization to help, and not f--- up, third party websites.
If Disqus (or Livewyre or whatever) ever made this kind of screw up, they'd seriously destroy their credibility, but unfortunately....
Fox is part of a class of media outlets that tells its audience what it believes it wants to hear. That's it. It's not about fact checking or anything like that, it's about knowing that its audience would actually stop watching it if it changed direction and concentrated more on telling them what Fox believes is true, rather than what the audience thinks is true.
On that note, someone is bound to mention MSNBC, but MSNBC isn't really watched by anyone. MSNBC's mistake, FWIW, is that it's trying to do the same thing as Fox but for a different audience, but doesn't realize that liberals, by and large, don't "want to hear" things they "agree with" if they can't be backed up with facts (plus I don't believe NBC actually has any idea what a diverse bunch liberals actually are in practice.)
I'm embarassed to say that I've worked for at least one media outlet (not going to say which, thankfully most Slashdotters have probably never heard of it) that tries to do the same thing though publishing a variety of different magazines. The "liberal" products did badly, the "tea party" products did well. I leave it to the reader to determine why.
As far as TFA goes, Slashdot is trolling us once again. Yay.
1. Excede is hardly typical. And, as you point out, they do provide an unmetered period.
2. I'm not sure if you mean PTP WiMax ISPs by Wireless ISPs (in which case if they don't fix their caps they're going to lose customers fast) or mobile phone ISPs, in which case you're unlikely to be hooking a games console up to it or using it as your primary home ISP, but either way, it's not an issue.
In the real world, a typical cap is something in the order of magnitude of Comcast's 250GB limit.
Finally, there's a difference between an optical disc based console game in terms of how it's provided and a game designed to be delivered to someone's harddrive over the Internet. 30GB is not typical of the latter, as users of Steam can testify. When was the last time you downloaded a game from Steam that wasn't a few gigabytes in size at most?
Why? Because with no local storage and limited memory, console games generally need access to uncompressed textures already processed to fit the resolution they're going to be displayed at.
I suspect the OP's comment is a combination of wishful thinking combined with misreading headlines. What is true is that:
1. The ChromeBook is doing well on Amazon. The fact it's topping the list of laptops shouldn't be seen as meaning that ChromeBooks in general are doing better than Windows 8 laptops because there are many, many, of the latter, and very few of the former.
2. Acer is saying that their ChromeBook is selling better than their Windows 8 machines. Again, that has to be balanced by context, Acer is one manufacturer, there are many more manufacturers of Windows laptops than ChromeBook laptops (and as such sales of ChromeBooks are split across fewer manufacturers)
There's no doubt the ChromeBook is doing extraodinarily well for a device that nobody has ever heard of. Actually, it'd be doing well even if it was well heard of. It's clearly a major threat to Microsoft and Apple right now. It may well be out-performing Apple's laptop sales already. But it's certainly not the top selling platform, even if some individual devices are top selling laptops.
Against that you kind of have to assume that at the very least this'll result in lower prices for new games, which by itself isn't a bad thing. Publishers will have to charge less to attract people who bought second hand games because they couldn't afford full price, as well as people like you who bought a $60 game seeing it as a $30 game with a $30 deposit.
I'm not that upset about this proposal, not so much because I see it as something that the market will correct, or because I don't have an X-Box, but because ultimately I've been a Steam user for a while now and have the same limitations on reselling bought content. But within a few months, pretty much every Steam game ends up in the $10-20 range, which is considerably lower than what either a new or used console game, in my experience (I do have a Wii), costs a few months after release.
Sure, eventually a Wii game will end up going down to the $10-20, but it usually takes a couple of years, not a few months.
And that's despite the fact it's Steam, which for all of its faults, has huge advantages over physical media that add value in areas where being unable to resell content takes away. I have two PCs, I install the same games on both of them, it syncs the games (usually) across both platforms, it handles updates, and best of all I don't have to drive seven miles to the nearest Gamestop or Best Buy just to find out that the game I want isn't even in stock.
The question I have for Microsoft is why are you even doing this? Why not get rid of the optical drive altogether and adopt the Steam model wholesale? If you're going to insist that users are connected to the Internet all of the time, then why not take advantage of that Internet connection, slap a huge hard drive in the box to replace the obligatory optical drive and flash card, and let people buy their games online?
Interestingly Gamestop's share price dropped yesterday, something that was seen by most of the financial press as being related to this unsubstantiated rumor.
Maybe they could go totally meta and do "Steam", with a rival studio releasing "Google Play Store" just to pre-empt them.
I don't believe this.
I don't see Microsoft as suddenly seeing it in its best interests to take on all the risk associated with every Windows release simply because Apple has a profitable niche market.
Everything about Surface screams "Look guys, this is our vision for how tablets should work. Now go away and make your own". It's sufficiently different from generic Android tablets to be obviously an attempt to introduce something new, while sufficiently niche - priced high, sold without encroaching on competitors - to obviously not be a sign Microsoft intends to take over hardware sales.
Moreover, it's necessary for Microsoft to do this. Google tried to do something similar when Honeycomb was released, but didn't go the whole distance, instead leaving it to third parties to produce the tablets according to a restricted specification that was compromized by having to be something every manufacturer could support. It was a disaster. The common platform appeared, but with minimal innovation (the Transformer was pretty much the only tablet that showed signs of the latter) and Honeycomb tablets sold poorly. It took Amazon, who basically told Google to go take a running jump from a short pier, to produce an Android device that actually had mass appeal.
Before this, Microsoft has only once been able to persuade a third party to do the hardware innovation necessary to create a first class platform for the software they want to sell, and in that case Microsoft was increadibly lucky, with the dominos set up right for them. That was in 1981. And IBM did the heavy lifting. There is no IBM in 2013. If Microsoft wants to popularize a new computing platform, it has to do it itself. It can, eventually, sit back and let third parties produce future Windows tablets, but right now it has to present to the world the full package, so people know what kind of tablet a Windows tablet is. And if third parties also want to produce Windows tablets, that's great and Microsoft will be happy to support them, even if it results in poor Surface sales.
I believe, from memory, you may be right about the junk. In which case...
Blade Runner is the one with Harrison Ford, I think they use a blimp at one point for advertising living on other planets but beyond that the blimps aren't really a fixture. As blimps are, today (and before the movie came out), used for advertising, that's not really a prediction of the future.
Corbin Dallas orders his meal from a blimp in The Fifth Element. While again blimps don't make other appearances (from memory) in that movie, the unusual (by 21st century standards) nature of the interaction, apparently considered usual in the Fifth Element universe, means that it's more likely to be what you're talking about.
This has been Morning for Pedants. Coming up next: the hilarious new game show "Your using the wrong word!"
If they were using hydrogen, which they're not, the giant ball of gas that's caught fire isn't going to "fall" on anything, until it turns into water - and I don't mean steam either, I mean liquid, heavier than air, water.
Conan O'Brien just called me to say the governor of some State south of New York would pitch in too, but as I've heard the same f---ing joke now, from Conan, about a gagillion times now I slammed the phone down.
Generally the economics are, indeed, linked to the abundance (and availability) of something.
That said, I'd like to see them use hydrogen anyway, like the AC. It's cheap, it's not nearly as dangerous as its reputation, and doing something about the image of hydrogen as a very dangerous thing to put in balloons or other lighter than air craft would help spur development of the latter.
True, you can drown in hydrogen mixed with oxygen in the right proportions. And a massive wave of it can destroy beachfront property.
There's never been some golden age where everything on TV was awesome. And there are some superb shows on TV right now, from Breaking Bad to Person of Interest. In fact, I'd say some of the best television ever made has been produced in the last decade or so in the US.
Quite, nerds would never show an interest in a computer game or new electronic gadget unless there's a young woman in a short dress in front of it.
It's a wonder anyone ever visits websites that aren't porn really.
Impressed by the idiot moderation and the even more idiot arguments.
Is this like Napster, or more like Winamp, both of which arguably existed to help those in the pirated music subculture, but with the former designed to facilitate the infringement, while the latter kinda was neutral but in an environment in which most users would, nonetheless, be copyright infringers?
I can't tell, because of the idiots who think that Napster and Google do the same thing, and have made this argument impossible to follow as a result.
It was pretty obviously a joke, not a troll. You're not a Slashdot moderator are you? In my experience, they can't tell the difference either.
Neither, UAE is the one to use.
You don't need to jailbreak an Android phone. Unless the carrier has deliberately locked it down (very, very, rare - AT&T did this with some Motorola phones) the phone will allow you to install software of your choice.
You may be confusing Jailbreaking with rooting. Rooting simply means getting access to certain kernel features that aren't normally available for security (your security) reasons. In general, Google's done a decent job keeping up with legitimate uses of root and providing APIs and subsystems to non-root users to implement things that once required root, such as tethering. I rooted my old Android 2.1-2.3 devices, I haven't needed to use root since ICS (4.0) however.
As far as CyanogenMod, do you even know what that is? It's a custom ROM. It has nothing to do with jailbreaking or security or any other crap. It's a custom version of Android modified to include features not normally included with Android, such as replacements for the shell (the Launcher in Android speak), better audio controls, etc.
You don't need it, but it's a bonus that CyanogenMod is available. Something like that is impossible in the iOS world - because iOS is a locked down system. CyanogenMod is only available because Android is open. So people can want an Android phone because they want an environment in which custom ROMs are possible.
I appreciate the concept of an open phone with an open operating system is hard to understand to many iPhone users, but that's what you get with Android. An arbitrary Android device will run arbitrary Android apps. You can develop them yourself, download them from the Internet, buy and install them using the Amazon app store - which you download from the Internet and install yourself, or use Google Play to buy and install them. You don't need the rotting corpse of Steve Jobs to give you permission. You get to enjoy your phone, the way you want.
Not only is that evidently not true, but I've seen plenty of criticism of Obama that seems likely to only exist because of the race angle. Do you think Bush would have had his country of birth questioned?
No they wouldn't, they'd put you in a certain prison camp in Cuba.
The thing about an IDE is that it's an obvious concept and pretty much anyone who's tried to make programming more user friendly has implemented such a thing. True, NetBeans looks nothing like the ZX80 or EMACS, but then Java in 2013 looks nothing like ZX BASIC either - as languages have evolved and projects have become more complex, the tools to manage them have needed to become more complex and manage more concepts.
What's funny is that we bothered giving the concept a name at an arbitrary cut-off point in the development of development environments.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying that, for example, most users of the GSM Galaxy Nexus in the US are doing so illegally?
We, after all, get our updates before Google releases the code to the community, not six months afterwards.